


And Over Kansas the Whole Universe Was Stilled

by audreycritter



Series: Cor Et Cerebrum [9]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Crying, Gen, Kent farm, Mentions of canonical death, c.s. lewis influences, catholic imagery kinda, jason todd is still coping, no profreading we die like mne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 17:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10541556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Jason has a hard time with memories of being dead.Partly because it took him a long time to even realize that's what they were.





	

Jason is outside the church leaning against the trunk of the car, smoking and flicking ash off the end of the cigarette with trembling hands, when Martha Kent finds him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to be rude. Just needed some air.”

“I see that,” she says, giving the cigarette in his hand a sharp look. But then she leans against the car next to him and says, “I’m not upset with you. Just wanted to check on you out here all by yourself.”

Jason fights a lump in his throat and shrugs.

“Did Father Marcus say something to upset you?” she asks.

Jason takes another long draw on the cigarette, flicks it again.

“Well, you can stay out here or–”

“I think I was in purgatory. Or limbo, I dunno,” Jason says quietly.

“Oh,” Martha says.

“Everything was gray,” he says. “And it went on forever.”

He can feel how wide his eyes must be, as he stares at the blacktop of the parking lot without really seeing it. He thinks of slate gray rows of houses with slate gray shingled roofs, going on out of sight into the smoky gray distance.

And every road he walked brought more of the same and not a single soul for miles. When he had found people, they had always seemed to forget they were talking to him, or anyone, halfway through their second sentence. He remembers being angry and terrified and pleading with them, only to find he, too, was trailing off and forgetting what he was doing until the other person inevitably wandered away, or he did.

So he had walked and walked and walked through empty gray houses and empty gray streets under a cloudy sky that seemed to have no sun or moon or stars or day or night, perpetually half-lit in an ashy glow. He had found he didn’t need sleep or food or drink, though he’d find tables set with feasts of washed out color. Sometimes he slept anyway, even though he had nightmares about crowbars and the color red, just to see something that wasn’t gray, just to do something that wasn’t walking.

And then one day it ended; he was sucked out of the timeless fog of it like it had never happened, like he hadn’t forgotten what a day was with the endless lack of days to count. And he’s tried not to think about it too much, about what it means.

When Zsasz had attacked, only a month ago now, he had known he had died again even though it surprised him when he was told. As stupid as it was, he’d never really put the two together before; the gray place always felt like some weird dream he couldn’t shake, something he’d had as a child that lingered in his brain until it was part of his own internal history.

But he had known it wasn’t a dream then, when his entire self was blinking in and out of existence in the gray again. One second he was sitting on a chair, the next he was swallowed in a darkness full of hurt, and again and again and again until the darkness stayed and turned into a warehouse and a cigarette and pain all over.

He wishes sometimes he could have just gone back to walking.

Then again, other days he recalls sharply the frustration and loneliness of impossible conversations and finds beauty in a line of poetry, a paragraph of prose; he finds himself lost in laughter or the grounding warmth of a hug; the timbre of Bruce’s voice like a homing beacon or the weight of Damian on his shoulders; the sugary crunch of a bowl of cereal quietly shared in Dick’s apartment. Those times, the gray place in memory feels not like the in-between he is certain it is, but like it’s own kind of hell and it scares the shit out of him, the idea of dying again.

For a third time.

And that is when he realizes he’s dropped his cigarette, he’s slumped down to the ground with his back against the bumper of the car, and he’s crying again because he’s always crying these days it seems, and Martha Kent’s arm is around his shoulders. He leans against her because he has to lean somewhere and his arms hurt and it’s cold, it’s fucking freezing on the ground, but she’s sitting with him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hiccuping, like he’s some shit kid instead of a grown-ass twenty-year-old man bawling in the parking lot of a small-town Kansas Catholic Church because a chorus of people sang, “ _who mourns in lonely exile here.”_

“Shh, honey, you’ve been through hell,” she says, and he knows she’s not being flippant.


End file.
